


Veil of Darkness

by hutchabelle



Category: Everlark - Fandom, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, Peeta Mellark - Fandom
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 09:35:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hutchabelle/pseuds/hutchabelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peeta’s hijacking uncovers a rage so intense it’s best described as wrath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Veil of Darkness

“Please! Don’t!” I whimper into the empty room. A searing pain streaks through my body. I can feel it from the tip of my toes to the ends of every strand on my head.

Whatever they gave me makes my body shake in agony. This it torture, literally and figuratively.

I can only hope they haven’t taken Katniss too. The last time I saw her she was slipping away from me in the arena, her head bobbing as she ran, her dark braid bouncing against her back, following Johanna down the hill through the jungle with the spool leaving a trail of electric wire behind them.

An invisible screen on the far wall flashes that same image and a bodiless voice intones, “She left you. She abandoned you. Katniss doesn’t love you, Peeta. She never did. She never will.”

“Stop saying that!” I scream. “She does love me! She would never abandon me!”

Katniss, the woman I love and fought to keep alive, runs away from the lightning tree, and I can’t take my eyes off her retreating back. As horrible as it is to see her running away from me again, I feel compelled to watch her for as long as I can.

This time, however, the vision changes.

Rage fills me, flooding through my veins in waves of pain, as I see Katniss stop right before she leaves my line of sight. This time she turns her head toward me and wiggles her fingers in a goodbye wave, a sneer of disgust on her face and glee in her eyes at her freedom. I hear myself whisper a denial, positive she wouldn’t willingly separate herself from me after our earlier discussion about splitting from the larger group the afternoon before we tried to carry out Beetee’s plan.

But the evidence is right in front of me. Katniss throws her head back in a cruel cackle and draws an arrow. Fitting it in her bow, she shoots straight at me, and I’m forced to duck to save my life. As I scramble back to my feet, lightning hits the tree and I’m blown backward and into darkness.

****

“Peeta, you worthless child! Get back in here and clean up this mess!”

I cringe as I hear my mother slam the rolling pin against the counter. I can’t seem to do anything right in her eyes.

Shaking the rug out quickly, I return to the kitchen and try to sneak past her to the closet to get the broom and dustpan. It doesn’t work, and I feel the sting of a wooden spoon across my left cheek.

Tears spring to my eyes at the pain and humiliation. A second smack from the spoon causes a welt to rise on my forearm.

Suddenly I’m furious. How dare she beat me? How dare she continually hurt me, her youngest son?

My fists clench, and I take a half step toward her but I’m stopped dead in my tracks when she raises the rolling pin with a crazed look in her eye. I gulp in panic and repress the indignation I feel from her treatment.

Now is not the time to fight her. Turning quickly, I flee from the room and into the safety of my father’s arms.

He can temper her wrath if anyone can.

****

I feel a small pinch in the crease of my elbow and struggle to ascend through the veil of darkness. My eyelids feel as if they weigh a ton each, but I open a slit in the right and, after several minutes, the left.

A Capitol nurse stands over me, one hand holding a rubber tie around my upper arm and the other inserting a hypodermic needle into the crease on the inside of my elbow.

I thrash against her, but the medicine she injects makes my arms and legs lifeless. I can’t move them no matter how hard I try.

With horror, I watch as she raises another needle to my face and lowers it to my temple. Inside I’m shaking with fury, my mind screaming at my body to move, to shove her arm away, to choke her until she’s lifeless. She’s hurting me.

I feel the needle going in and panic when I realize my eyes won’t close, not even to blink, as a result of the injection she’s administered.

In a frenzy, I scream at her, cursing her, but she doesn’t react at all.

Without warning, the ceiling reveals an image of Katniss. She’s laughing as she stands with her mother and Prim. My father lies on the table in front of them, blood flowing from a gash in his lower arm. They’re doing nothing to help him.

I start when Katniss’ lip curls in hatred. It’s so sudden I almost don’t believe it happened, but then she plunges the needle into his arm so hard it snaps off when she tries to pull it out.

I glance at the nurse who remains next to me. Maniacal laughter echoes throughout the room. It’s Katniss’ laugh, but it’s coming from the woman beside me. She turns her face to me, and she’s morphed into Katniss. Her face is twisted, grotesque, cruel. Her upper lip curled in anger; her eyes flash hatred; her teeth rot before my eyes and drip from her mouth in a black goo that runs down her chin to stain the pristine white of her uniform. Terror pulses through me as her eyes disintegrate, and she raises another syringe.

“I hate you, Peeta. You are worthless. Your mother was right about you. I wish you’d never been born,” Katniss scoffs as the needle pierces my skin again. Just like in the image on the ceiling, the needle snaps off in my arm as she jerks it back.

I scream in denial, wailing at the pain she’s inflicting on me. My insides are on fire as venomous fluid pumps into me from an IV that’s suddenly attached to my arm where the broken needle breaks my skin. The liquid flowing into me is black, the same color and consistency of her disintegrated teeth.

I struggle to move my arms or my legs, trying to knock this horrific version of my district partner away but my body remains rigid on the table.

Furious, I glare at her. “You aren’t my Katniss. She would never do this to me.”

“I already have.” The words fall from the toothless Katniss as she waves the syringe in front of my eyes.

The ceiling flashes an image of the cave in the first games. She’s bleeding, blood pouring down her forehead in dark red, almost black, rivulets, and she rips a small syringe from an orange bag and plunges it into my arm.

Heat flushes me, a burning so intense I want to choke her. I want to watch the light fade from her eyes—if she even still has them. I can’t tell which Katniss is real anymore. I thought she wasn’t here in the Capitol with me. They told me she blew up the force field so she could escape and leave me behind.

A myriad of images flash across the ceiling as I puzzle over my memories. Katniss plunges the needle into me over and over as the evil laugher continues.

I bellow my anger so hard and so long that I lose my voice and then I scream silently until I succumb to darkness again.

The last image I see before I slip beneath the cloak of unconsciousness is the disfigured face of Katniss as she spits insults at me.

****

“Why are you so stupid, Peeta? Why are you so clumsy? Why can’t you do anything right?”

My mother repeats these insults every day, and today is no different. I’ve just knocked a pan of freshly baked cookies into the sink by accident, and my mother’s anger is quick to rise to the surface.

Screeching with rage, she pulls the cookie pan from the sink and throws it at me. I yelp in indignation when the corner hits the side of my head so hard it gives me an instantaneous headache.

She chases me from the backroom, screaming epithets at me, but I stop as soon as I enter the shop. I’m rooted to the spot because I can see Katniss and her sister Prim admiring the cakes through the windows.

It’s been four years since I threw her that bread, and she and her family seem to be doing significantly better now. They look as well fed as any of the families in the Seam and much better than they did when I threw the intentionally burned loaves to her when we were both ten.

Katniss taps Prims shoulder and beckons her away just as my mother slams the swinging doors into my back and knocks me to the ground resulting in a cut lip where my bottom teeth slices through the skin as I fall.

Why is she doing this to me? Why doesn’t she care about me?

I’m livid, furious with her for caring more about her livelihood than her flesh and blood. Why had she even bothered to keep me if she hates me this much?

“Get in there and start over, Peeta, and make sure the oven is roaring for the loaves your father has to bake later. Hurry, you lazy brat!” she shrieks.

Scrambling away from her on my hands and heels, I return to the kitchen and stoke the fire, adding more fuel so the bread will turn golden brown for my father. As the fire grows, I allow myself a moment of fantasy.

The next time my mother yells at me, the next time I feel hatred toward her, I will end it. I’ll shove her in the bread oven and slam the door. She can go up in flames, and she won’t be able to hurt me again.

Back in the Capitol, my eyes pop open and I can still hear the cackling; Katniss continues to laugh cruelly at my misfortunate, but this time the projected images show my home district. Pictures of District 12, including the bakery and the window to my bedroom, flash on the walls, and I see my mother and father working in the shop through the glass display windows.

A burst of light streaks through the image and fire explodes from the Seam, down the streets, and engulfs the bakery. Everything is gone in an instant. My parents, the store, my home, everything.

Liquid pumps into my arm from the broken needle, and I see Katniss’ face but with my mother’s voice screaming insults from her lips.

“You did this! You killed us! Katniss killed us! You shouldn’t have trusted her! She’s not human! She’s a monster, a mutt, a fake! She used you, Peeta. She never loved you. Just like I never loved you.”

“Shut up!” I hurl back, my voice so loud it leaves my throat raw. “I hate you! I hate you both! I’m glad you’re dead! Shut up!”

The room goes completely dark, all the lights shut off at once, but the voices remain. My mother’s voice interlaces with Katniss’ until I can’t tell the difference anymore. Both of them break me emotionally until I despise them more than I thought possible.

I want them dead.

****

Days run together, and I have no idea how long I’ve been here. I can barely remember the interviews with Caesar, let alone a time before I was trapped in this blue-walled cell and forced to watch videos of my life as they mutate into something insidious every time.

I am angry all the time, furious at my condition, irate in my interactions with people, enraged when a single image flickers on the walls. It doesn’t matter what the Capitol forces me to watch; all of it makes me livid. 

They don’t bother to restrain me anymore. There’s no need for that. I’m probably not rational, helped along by my addiction to whatever drug they dispensed to me through the IV. There’s a pump in the room, so I can give myself the drug now, and I do, sometimes as often as three or four times a day.

I shred my clothes after every dose and then I rake my fingernails over my chest until I bleed. When I try to do the same to my face, they give me gloves to wear, but I shred them.

I am frantic, frenzied, someone else entirely, and all I want is to see Katniss dead. She’s to blame for everything. She’s the one who exploded the arena and allowed me to be captured. She’s the reason my mother hated me. She’s the reason I’m deranged, separated from everyone I’ve ever known and loved.

“I’ll kill her,” I promise them when they ask, nameless, faceless people whose voices sound like my mother’s.

“I’ll kill her,” I assure them when they reduce security in the prison. Johanna and I can see each other now, and I tried to pretend I’m still me when we speak. I don’t want her to warn anyone about me.

“I’ll kill her,” I vow to myself when I slip into nightmares every night, haunted by images and sounds of her as a monster.

“I’ll kill her,” I pledge when my hands contract around her neck in a place called District 13.

“I’ll kill her,” I swear when people rip me away from her and plunge another needle into my arm.

I fight them with everything I have, but the veil of darkness takes me again.


End file.
